1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a chord setting apparatus and an electronic wind instrument which produces a musical tone associated with a chord set by this apparatus.
2. Description of the Related Art
There is known a so-called electronic wind instrument which has pitch designating switches located where a player can easily touch them and with which the player designates a single pitch (note) through a single operation by a combination of how to press these switches and plays a music with a musical tone at the designated pitch.
According to this type of electronic wind instrument, however, unlike electronic keyboard instruments or electronic stringed instruments, pitches are assigned to different combinations of the pitch designating switches in operation, not in one-to-one correspondence to the switches. It is not therefore possible to designate a plurality of pitches simultaneously.
Because of the above, electronic wind instruments are generally considered capable of giving only singletone initiated musical performance and a chord performance using the instruments is hardly thought of.
Typical electronic wind instruments have around ten pitch designating switches which include seven switches corresponding to pitches of notes C to B and two for designating sharp (#) and flat (b). Unlike electronic keyboard instruments and electronic stringed instruments having many pitch designating switches, therefore, the electronic wind instruments may designate major chords at the best if need be and cannot be expected to ensure easy designation of different chords such as minor and seventh chords.
With the use of such an electronic wind instrument which has fewer pitch designating switches and generally designates pitches by combinations of these switches in operation, there hardly exists a method available or proposed for playing a music with many chords including not only major chords but also different types of chords such as minor and seventh chords. The only method, it seems, is to program in advance pitch differences with respect to roots designated by the pitch designating switches and generate a chord sound when actually playing a music, by automatically preparing a root designated by operation of the pitch designating switches and musical tones based on the pitch difference data programmed with respect to the designated root. (Refer to the manuals of YAMAHA WX-7 and WX-11 and AKAI EWV2000.)
With the use of the above method for setting a chord according to the mentioned program system, however, it is necessary to provide a switch or switches to enter pitch differences, a display unit for displaying input data at the time of programming and a memory for storing the entered pitch difference data. This would inevitably increase the manufacturing cost and require a troublesome operation for executing the programming.
In addition, when power is turned off, the set pitch difference data will be erased and should be programmed again. This is very inconvenient. To back up the memory as one solution, it is necessary to provide a power unit for memory backup, thus increasing the cost. Due to a small mounting space in or on the electronic wind instrument body, the memory backup unit should be externally mounted. This is disadvantageous for the portability of the instrument and will get in the way of playing a music.